Wednesday, November 30, 2005

The CIA's Spooky Leaks

A few weeks back, we opined on the open undermining of the Bush administration undertaken by unnamed operatives and/or officials at the CIA—you know, the ones who show up in the Washington Post every few weeks trashing current CIA Director Porter Goss and his evil staff of Republican minions. Well, John Hinderaker follows up on this with a good bit more detail in the online Weekly Standard:

THE CIA'S WAR against the Bush administration is one of the great untold storiesof the past three years. It is, perhaps, the agency's most successful covertaction of recent times. The CIA has used its budget to fund criticism of the administration by former Democratic officeholders. The agency allowed an employee, Michael Scheuer, to publish and promote a book containing classified information, as long as, in Scheuer's words, "the book was being used to bash the president." However, the agency's preferred weapon has been the leak. In one leak after another, generally to the New York Times or the Washington Post, CIA officials have sought to undermine America's foreign policy. Usually this is done by leaking reports or memos critical of administration policies or skeptical of their prospects. Through it all, our principal news outlets, which share the agency's agenda and profit from its torrent of leaks, have maintained a discreet silence about what should be a major scandal.

Read the rest of it here. Hinderaker's conclusions are chilling and well worth pondering.

Wonker would take these conclusions further. With the crucial exception of the military, patriots to the core, the entire Federal bureaucracy, more or less, has been populated by leftist, unionist supporters of the Democratic Party since the time of Roosevelt. At times, the Government has been infiltrated and, in fact, deeply penetrated by agents, operatives, or sympathizers of the former Soviet union and American interests have been actively undermined. Such penetration is not, of course, exclusive to the United States. But it is surprising how effective it becomes when most of an operative's colleagues are, at least philosophically, fellow travelers.

The tendency of the Federal government today is for many Federal employees to actively support and carry out the initiatives of Democratic presidents while undermining, stalling, or otherwise stymieing those of Republicans until Democrats can be returned to office. Republican presidents—not just Bush—are simply not regarded as legitimate. Therefore it is not treasonous to oppose them. Astonishing but true. It's important to remember this as the real CIA scandal begins to unfold. BTW, this scandal will almost certainly be reported only in the blogosphere, as the media, specifically the Washington Post and the New York Times, are deeply involved in conveying the CIA's anti-Bush leakage to the public while covering up the administration's many successes.